Indians of North America; Indians of North America -- Government relations; Indians of North America -- Legal status, laws, etc.
Next, we have that large and increasing class of Americans, who, either
from natural bias, or from the severe political shocks of the last
twelve years, have accepted what we may call the politics of despair, by
which is meant, not so much a belief in any definite ill fortune for the
Republic, as a conviction that the United States are being borne on to
an end not seen, by a current which it is impossible to resist; that it
is futile longer to seek to interpose restraints upon the rate of this
progress, or to change its direction; that the nation has already gone
far outside the traditional limits of safe political navigation, and is
taking its course, for weal or woe, across an unknown sea, not unlike
that little squadron which sailed out from the Straits of Saltez on the
3d of August, 1492. Many of the persons now holding these views were
formerly among the most conservative of our people; but emancipation,
negro suffrage, and the consolidation of power consequent upon the war,
have wholly unsettled their convictions, leaving them either hopeless of
the Republic, or, as temperament serves, eager to crowd on sail, and
prove at once the worst and the best of fortune. In this despair of
conservative methods, some of these men have acquired an oddly objective
way of looking at their country, which to every man ought to be a part
of himself, and have apparently as much of a curious as of a patriotic
interest in watching the development of the new forms and forces of
national life. Men of this class (and they are not few) are not likely
to hesitate in extending to the Indians citizenship and the ballot. A
little more or less, they think, can make no difference. After negro
suffrage, any thing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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